Abstract
Forest musk deer (Moschus berezovskii; FMD) are both economically valuable and highly endangered. A problem for FMD captive breeding programs has been the susceptibility of FMD to abscesses. To investigate the mechanisms of abscess development in FMD, the blood transcriptomes of three purulent and three healthy individuals were generated. A total of ~39.68 Gb bases were generated using Illumina HiSeq 4000 sequencing technology and 77,752 unigenes were identified after assembling. All the unigenes were annotated, with 63,531 (81.71%) mapping to at least one database. Based on these functional annotations, 45,798 coding sequences (CDS) were detected, along with 12,697 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and 65,536 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A total of 113 unigenes were found to be differentially expressed between healthy and purulent individuals. Functional annotation indicated that most of these differentially expressed genes were involved in the regulation of immune system processes, particularly those associated with parasitic and bacterial infection pathways.
Highlights
Forest musk deer (Moschus berezovskii; FMD) are primarily found in Southern Asia and are economically valuable due to the musk that is secreted by the musk gland of males[1,2,3]
Due to the key role that the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) plays in immune responses, the genetic diversity of the MHC class II proteins was linked to abscesses in FMD25–27 and it has been suggested that the MHC plays a critical role in determining the resistance or susceptibility of an individual FMD to abscesses[26]
When comparing single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) between the 2 groups, we found that 770 SNPs were conserved within groups but polymorphic between groups, indicating that variation at these SNPs sites might be closely related to the occurrence of abscesses in FMD (Supplementary Table S6)
Summary
Forest musk deer (Moschus berezovskii; FMD) are primarily found in Southern Asia and are economically valuable due to the musk that is secreted by the musk gland of males[1,2,3]. Another study of bacterial pathogens in FMD found that suppurative disease was typically caused by Pasteurella spp. or Pseudomonas aeruginosa or Yersinia spp., Actinomyces pyogenes and Staphylococcus spp.[21]. Knowledge of the mechanism of abscess formation in FMD is limited, partly due to the lack of understanding of how gene regulation impacts disease formation and progression. This limitation is not trivial because diseases, as we have noted with purulent disease, are usually complex and involve numerous diverse metabolic pathways. Transcriptome analysis is a powerful means with which to explore disease pathogenesis, physiological homeostasis and the complexity of systems biology[38]
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